Movie Review : Enemy (2014)
There really isn’t anyone quite like Denis Villeneuve working in American cinema today. He’s not exactly cutting edge, but he isn’t your run-of-the-mill studio work. He understands the business of cinema, but he values original idea. Villeneuve is difficult to figure out because he doesn’t fit a pre-established archetype. One movie that makes him even harder to figure out is the enigmatic Enemy, which not all that many people have seen.
For good reasons, Enemy is so weird, it doesn’t fit anywhere on the Denis-Villeneuve-is-a-Hollywood-outsider scale.
Enemy tells the story of Adam Bell (the always fantastic Jake Gyllenhall), a mild-mannered college history teacher who finds out another man who looks exactly like him exists. The other guy Anthony Claire (also played by Gyllenhaal) is a third rate actor with a pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon) who doesn’t seem to like him or trust him so much. The two plan to meet, which may or may not destroy their individual psyche. I know, it’s a lot about two guys freaking out over their cosmic identical twin.
Of Symbolic Death and Stupid-Ass Spiders
Enemy is one of these movies your friends and co-workers will hate. They’ll tell you the plot didn’t make any fucking sense. That it frustrated them and eluded their understanding. Don’t be too quick at calling them normies, it is not an easy film to wrap your head around. Enemy operates on surreal and symbolic logic more than it operates on a straightforwardly narrative one. It does not turn try to tell you as story as much as it is providing weird and mysterious images for you to assemble your own.
The two protagonist of Enemy face the loss of their uniqueness. They are not themselves anymore since someone else is themselves and therefore face a symbolic death. Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Javier Gullon make it PRET-TAY obvious with a scene where Adam gives a lecture on dictatorship, claiming their methods of control include limiting arts, culture and self-expression. Adam and Anthony are losing their individuality or they’re just one man losing his own. However you want to see it.
Adam and Anthony’s lives are collapsing unto one another. One becomes the other and vice versa. Enemy is somewhat of a funeral for their selves, which Villeneuve illustrates in two ways: spiders and the overbearing use of yellow filters. The latter is self-explanatory: yellow is associated with mental illness in symbolism and psychology. The former is a little more complicated than that. Spiders are just freaky by nature, but Denis Villeneuve is clearly using them to illustrates his characters symbolic deaths.
What? How? What the fuck?
This one is opened to interpretation. One critic claimed that spiders represent how Adam and Anthony view women, which kind of makes sense since both characters have girlfriends who are depicted to be aggressive and controlling. But it doesn’t make sense in the sense that thew girlfriends have nothing to do whatsoever with the dictatorship metaphor and the unraveling of their personalities. Villeneuve basically admitted in interview that he placed the spiders in just to be a provocative jerk. Ugh.
Subterranean Storytelling
Denis Villeneuve also made it abundantly clear in interview that Enemy was narrated from a subconscious point of view, so the dictatorship theme has to be taken from a metaphorical standpoint. Society is trying to control Adam/Anthony, to make him serve a function that is alien to his own desires. Villeneuve illustrates the coldness and the vapidity of his existence through a series of pretty awesome Ballardian settings. Large Brutalist buildings, slabs of concrete, large empty space, etc.
That is the part of Enemy I enjoyed the most. The protagonist wandering into empty, desolate urban landscape that both reflects their inner psyche and their meaningless role in society. There’s a great scene where Adam breaks into Anthony’s agency building only to find that no one is there, except a lonely security guard. Enemy is a movie that feels lonely and oppressive, which I believe is the point. That it’s about how function over individuality leading to the erosion of the self.
Spiders be damned. Enemy might’ve been a little too cerebral for festival audiences without them, but it would’ve removed a layer of confusing and frustrating dreamlike logic. Plus, I fucking hate spiders. I walked away from the final frame of the movie because of that. Plus, how many horror movies/novels end up with fucking spiders because it’s just a terrifying image and they don’t know how to end it, am I right? Fuck, spiders and fuck people who are trying to use them symbolically.
*
Enemy is a good movie. It is Denis Villeneuve Lynchian outlier. It is based on a Jose Saramago novel that doesn’t have nearly the same amount of weird shit in it, but Saramago doesn’t like to use punctuation so who cares about not being faithful to his work. My interpretation of it is as good as yours. It’s a movie that assembles itself in your subconscious as much as it does on screen. It’s quality but it is my least favourite American Denis Villeneuve movie because fuck spiders.
